Oh wow, I had a LOT of subconscious resentment in there, didn't I, for the mere crime of moving (VITAL!) things like the apostrophe key to a silly and nonintuitive place.

But it's all better now, isn't it, yes my precioussssssssss....

(Still not sure how I feel about that mousepad with the buttons not separate from the touch-surface...but this I think would affect my life far less than trying to shift between computers with keys in radically different places on a daily basis. This close, this close I came to going Acer or HP... *whew*)

(This and me having to argue for up to a full half hour with sundry editors that it was not correct to call a Bajan songstress or a London-born writer "African American"...that it was not a style or grammar question or something we needed to have any meetings in order to form a policy on it, it was simply inaccurate and factually, geographically, and politically unsound...)

Specificity is difficult, but correct, I think. (My druthers, we'd have lists and everyone would be made familiar with them in grade school -- Cree, Crow, Ojibwa, Salish, K'iche', and so on. * hubristically remakes world in my image* ~__^)

I'm not ready for spring, but then I'm never ready for spring. I'm looking at all these people in skirts with no jackets and thinking "How brave!" and "What if it's cold this evening!?"

Every April/May, I always feel immodest for about a month and a half. Immodest and lacking a barrier between my butt and the subway seats... woo-hoo, swine flu! :-( I'm gonna start carrying a Lysol can, I swear.)

[E]ven if all [former AIG exec Jake DeSantis's] claims about himself aren't bullshit, they are claims about himself. He himself is his only object of concern. He shows no sign that he understands that his job was playing not just with other people's money but with their lives.

People lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their life savings because of things AIG and the other big Wall Street casinos did. It doesn't matter that he was personally honest and competent, he was still part of it. In fact, his honesty and competence contributed to the disasters, because he helped keep that division, and AIG, going while the mess was being made. The mess was bigger, the harm was greater, because he gave his incompetent and dishonest colleagues cover and time to continue making messes and doing harm.

It doesn't matter if he didn't know what was going on at the time. He knows it now. And it should bother him. He should feel guilty, even if the actual blame doesn't fall on him. It should bother him that he's pocketing millions of dollars while the people who were screwed by his fellow wheelers and dealers are wondering if they're going to have enough money to buy groceries next week.

But I get no sense that he has a sense that other people besides himself were screwed or that they even exist to be screwed.

Before that, I was here: Slate: Why does Star Wars take over the minds of small boys? (Er, I would submit that observations of one's two own sons does not a viable "study" make, but whatever. Also, the title is actually "still take over" but I think the question the essay actually addressed is the one I typed above. Whatever, it's still pretty cute.)